§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns helping to ensure a quality experience in an advertising network. In particular, the present invention concerns determining whether or not a Website complies with policies, and/or meets certain quality standards of an advertising network.
§1.2 Background Information
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.
Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Interactive advertising provides opportunities for advertisers to target their ads to a receptive audience. That is, targeted ads are more likely to be useful to end users since the ads may be relevant to a need inferred from some user activity (e.g., relevant to a user's search query to a search engine, relevant to content in a document requested by the user, etc.). Query keyword targeting has been used by search engines to deliver relevant ads. For example, the AdWords advertising system by Google of Mountain View, Calif., delivers ads targeted to keywords from search queries. Similarly, content targeted ad delivery systems have been proposed. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 10/314,427 (incorporated herein by reference and referred to as “the '427 application”) titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR SERVING RELEVANT ADVERTISEMENTS”, filed on Dec. 6, 2002 and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik and Paul Buchheit as inventors; and 10/375,900 (incorporated by reference and referred to as “the '900 application”) titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT,” filed on Feb. 26, 2003 and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Buchheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Hank, Deepak Jindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors, describe methods and apparatus for serving ads relevant to the content of a document, such as a Web page for example. Content targeted ad delivery systems, such as the AdSense advertising system by Google for example, have been used to serve ads on Web pages.
As can be appreciated from the foregoing, serving ads relevant to concepts of text in a text is useful because such ads presumably concern a current user interest. Consequently, such content-targeted advertising has become increasingly popular. However, such advertising systems still have room for improvement.
The success of the content-targeted advertising networks, such as Google AdSense program for example, relies on three (3) important constituents—advertisers, Website publishers (referred to below as “Web publishers”), and end users. Many advertisers want be assured that the Websites where their ads are displayed are of a high quality, will generate a positive return on investment (ROI), and will not cause any controversy for them Web publishers need to continue to attract end users through relevant and high quality content. Last, but not least, end users generally want to visit only those Websites that provide a good experience. Further, end users generally select only those ads that are relevant to the context of the Webpage and that help them find a product or service that meets their needs. A high-quality network is thus critical to ensure that a virtuous cycle is created that helps expands the advertising network by attracting new publishers, advertisers and end users.
Current ways to ensure the quality of Website participating in an advertising network include, for example, reviewing Websites manually (e.g., to ensure that they comply with policy guidelines, that they do not create a poor end-user experience, and that the content allows relevant ads to be targeted). Unfortunately, manual review of Websites is ill-equipped to handle the explosive growth experienced by online advertising networks.
In view of the difficulties in manually reviewing many new Websites in a time and cost effective manner, some advertising networks have limited such manual review to only those Websites that advertisers and/or end users have complained about. Unfortunately, end users and/or advertisers may demand a more proactive approach. Therefore, having a more proactive ad Website approval process would be useful.